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The jam and the bees.

Windows 7 app

I’ve been thinking recently about a nice app for Windows 7 phones, targeted at the climbing market. It would be a way to take a photograph of a rock, and clearly mark a route up to climb.

The problem with a lot of climbing books is twofold: first, their pictures are relatively low quality with no route marking up a rock face indicating how to ascend (only a verbal description that’s often vague), and second there’s no real way to tell how to find the rock face that the book’s author is thinking of.

A windows 7 application could really solve both of these things: high quality photographs with the killer onboard cameras, with some basic editing skills like contrast adjustment, and the ability to draw a route dynamically onto a rock face using touch, we have the first problem solved. The second is solved by using the geolocation features inside the images that modern cameras save. Makes everything easy to find, and when you get there there’s a nice picture available (assuming someone’s already posted one).

I was thinking about tying this in with some online services, too: azure for backend storage, ability to post to a mountainproject page. This could be pretty slick if I get it right.

I’m thinking that this, tied with a powerful desktop application to navigate through and organise notes and whatnot for the phone, would be a pretty powerful service for climbers all over. That, plus it’d be a natural target for any upcoming tablet devices….